LETTER FROM PARIS:Attention is turning to the capital's next green public transport wheeze – electric cars for hire, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
THE RELIEF of coming upon one of those sleek green-lit bike rental stations just when you need it is one of the small pleasures of Parisian life. But the balm of civic gratitude that settled over me as I coasted along near-deserted streets after missing the last buses and metros recently is scarcely universal.
The vélib project came as a gift not just to the Parisian bourgeois-bohème and the free-riding foreigner, but to another well-represented demographic: those with a penchant for smashing bikes against walls, slashing their tyres, chipping lumps out of their frames and tossing the sorry heaps into the Seine. The operators have spent the past 2½ years puzzling over the problem.
However, the upshot has been theft and vandalism on a staggering scale, with 18,000 bikes damaged and 8,000 stolen since the scheme’s introduction in July 2007.
City councillors and JCDecaux, the advertising company that runs vélib (as well as its smaller Irish cousin, Dublin Bikes), say they never expected such abuse and have devoted a lot of time and money to improving security.
But to listen to much of the anguished commentary, you’d be forgiven for thinking the experiment had been shown to be a calamitous utopian folly foiled by the incorrigible vandalistic instincts of the ungrateful Parisian masses. Actually, it has been a major popular success.
More than 61 million journeys have been made, many of them by commuters who use the bikes regularly and have gained themselves a noun: vélibeur.
An expansion earlier this year saw the service extend from the city into nearby suburbs, bringing the number of bicycles from 10,000 two years ago to 21,500 today.
There’s even a dating service, vélibataire, (a contraction of vélib and célibataire – the French for “single”) that offers strangers a chance to meet for a cycle at any of 1,450 stations across the city.
The bicycles themselves don’t just complement the urban public space; they have – like Dublin’s Luas bell – quickly become an integral part of it. Little wonder that cities such as Montreal, Brisbane and Dublin have followed suit.
There are also signs that the city may be coming to grips with the problem of vandalism.
A new docking mechanism makes it harder for first-time users to misuse the system (tourists were widely blamed for inadvertently leaving their bikes unlocked), a lesson that was applied in Dublin and partly explains the fact that – at time of writing – just a single “Dublin Bike” has been stolen.
Initially City Hall took most of the proceeds from bicycle hire and paid virtually none of the costs. But last month the Mairie de Paris finally relented in the face of pressure from JCDecaux and agreed that the Parisian taxpayer should pay a greater part of the cost of the stolen and damaged bicycles.
The city will pay up to 25 per cent of the replacement cost of the bicycles, up from between four and 20 per cent previously.
The city authorities also gave JCDecaux a greater stake in plans to expand the service, with the company to get 50 per cent of all revenues beyond €17.5 million.
As it happened, the conclusion of negotiations on a revised vélib contract came just as attention was turning to Paris’s next public transport wheeze: autolib.
Modelled on the vélib and inspired by a similar scheme running in Lyon, the autolib will further burnish the city’s green credentials by providing thousands of electric cars that drivers can pick up and drop off anywhere in the city.
The first electric car project of its kind in a capital city, autolib will consist of 1,000 stations – 700 within the city limits and the rest beyond the péripherique ring road – each holding three cars.
Drivers will be able to pick up either a two- or four-seater at any rental stand by simply swiping a credit card through a reader at any time of day or night.
Although rates haven’t yet been set, city officials say a half-hour will cost between €4 and €5.
The socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë, who believes the project could “revolutionise transport”, hopes to put the scheme out to tender by the end of the year and for work to begin on the service in 2010.
Not everyone is enamoured of the idea, though. Some green politicians are uneasy with the notion of encouraging people to use any type of car instead of providing incentives to stick with bikes, metros and buses.
And then there’s the question of security. How to prevent the cars suffering the same fate as the bikes and save them from ending up in a watery grave in the Seine?
“It’s a subject we’re particularly conscious of,” a spokeswoman for Mr Delanoë says.
No doubt it is.